I was listening to the song “Lagi aaj sawan ki…” and wondered why I like sad songs inspite of the fact that I get over things quickly and so, sadness for me is hardly a persistent emotion. Thinking about it I realized that to get over sadness one needs to accept the fact that one is sad, face the reality, experience the emotion in its full intensity and only then can one move on. One can’t move on by denying either the facts or one’s own emotional state. A sad song is an exercise of experiencing sadness in its full intensity. It is therapeutic.

For completeness, here are the lyrics of the song with an attempt at translation. Lyricist: Anand Bakshi

Those days too were the same, the days when we had met Then, flowers had blossomed not in gardens but in our hearts The weather is the same, but the season [of love] isn’t Along with me, the rain is crying too That same…

And finally, because I can’t resist it, the line “Has anything once broken ever been mended?” brought the second law of thermodynamics to mind! With a mind like that I can’t remain sad for long, can I?

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In my case, a true favorite in the same vein could perhaps be singled out as: “sheeshaa ho yaa dil ho, aakhir, TooT jaataa hai…”

Which, incidentally, used to throw up to the mind a line like the first part of: “http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/34122.html”

Which part, I had (mistakenly) been impressed with, for a while in my teens (because that was the only part I had read quoted), and which part, after growing up to be a man (to my twenties), I had actually thought was a good fit to describe the microcracking toughening mechanism in the ceramic-ceramic composites.

Obviously, we seem to have (had) different research interests.

The usually brittle things like ceramics, when re-arranged as composites, actually become tougher, because under mechanical loading, as they develop micro-cracks, they also release the strain energy. The micro-cracks are disconnected enough that they don’t actually severe the object apart. So, the composites become tougher by developing cracks. Paradoxical.

Knowing this, some of the US idiots successfully sold this idea to enhance toughness via this route to some other US idiots. The other US idiots invested millions of dollars in that very same idea—only in the end to jack up the KIC fracture toughness from about 1–2 to about 5—10 MPa sqrt m, at the most, even as the first US idiots kept on promising (via hype, of course) to get to 100 (in the same units), in a matter of a decade or so—even as plain common-sense told otherwise. … MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CalTech, GATech, UIUC, Santa Barbara,… the list continued. … Most none of them is to be found any special-where today. (Though, they did get their tenures at the top 5/10 universities, after beating, say, the Indian graduates (like the JPBTIs), in that “fair and open” “competition”—National Scores, GRE scores, h-indices, … You get the idea.)

Anyway, the world does (mostly) break (most) every_thing_ and afterward a few (of those things) are somewhat tough (though not strong) due to (though not in) the broken places.

OK, to wind up: Despite the generation gap, let me say, that song was a nice piece of selection. It did provide me with some recollection of “research” (even if not with some food for thought—then, or now).

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Don't worry about changing the politicians. The politicians will wear their fingers to the bone sticking them in the air to test which way the wind is blowing. Instead, work on changing the wind. If you change the wind, the politicians will follow.
Richard Ralston, AFCM